Score Big During The World Cup – How To Use Sports Data Creatively

With close to 40 nationalities, we’re definitely feeling the World Cup frenzy at our offices around the world – but it’s not just the matches that get us excited; did you know that you can use World Cup results in near-real time in your Facebook and Instagram creative? As long as the results are in an API, such as this one for the World Cup, you’ll be able to customize your ads on-the-go to include match data such as results in your ads. There are around four billion football fans on the planet, make sure to catch their attention this summer. Read on for ideas and a step-by-step tutorial to connecting the World Cup feed on the Smartly.io platform.

Getting Creative With Football Data

Smartly.io Automated Ads is a feed-based advertising solution that allows you to automatically combine different data points in your creative, or target based on those data points: you can use weather information, pollen levels in the air, and in this case, sports results. The creative applications are virtually endless, challenge your creative team to come up with engaging – and relevant – use cases to drive ad performance during the cup.

Here are a few ideas to get you started:

Food delivery business: advertise recipes from the countries facing each other

Travel brands: promote offers to travel to the winning countries each day

Design for the Frenzy, Then Automate ItOur Image and Video Templates are a great way to join in on the celebrations. Include football specific imagery and designs into your still and video campaigns to stand out on Instagram Stories and in the News Feed. The best part is that once you’ve created the templates and connected them to a catalog or a product feed, your ads will run automatically at scale – without the need to bother your designers with hundreds of variations customized per product.

Win With Instagram Stories Ads

Football is the most popular sport on Instagram and Stories Ads are one of the most effective ways to grab attention on social. Use our new Video Templates feature to automatically generate Stories ads with sporty animations and football-appropriate overlays. Read more about Stories here.

How To Connect the World Cup Feed on Smartly.io

This example below shows the combination of using this sports API in your feed and our Dynamic Image Templates to create beautiful, automatically updating, event-accurate ads:

Paste the code and run the script to move the World Cup data into a sheet in Google Docs. Get in touch with your account manager or search the Smartly.io Support Center if you'd like to use the script we wrote.

2) Next, set a trigger to run this function every 10 minutes (which checks the API for changes and updates your feed).)

You find this by clicking on the clock and then choosing the function you want to run:

3) Then, lastly, go to the sheet name you chose above; this is where the API data is imported into your feed (in this case using Google Sheets and Google Script)

Then you can simply use this data or use vlookup to extract the sports API information into your Automated Ads feed: